LITERARY WEBZINE

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POETRY [ ? ] :: Incubus by Linda Rathgeber :: He came again last night... as he often does when I am mostly content with my life and have forgotten him, a stratospheric glider plunging through the nebulous layers of my dreams, sweeping into my sleeping consciousness, rousing memories of past lives forgotten and places long unseen. I've shivered to his silken laughter countless times, seen the starry glitter of his eyes in the mullioned windows of high stone towers, that, upon leaning too far past the vertical, fall floating silently to earth as I run screaming, hair streaming, rime-stiffened grass disintegrating beneath my heels. He's the ragged, cross-eyed, sooty crow who sneaky-follows four year olds to bed and wedges himself into the intersection of the planes of wall and ceiling where even mothers armed with scratchity brooms can't chase him far enough away. His was the steaming, weed-draped figure that dragged me, face pressed into his brine-streaked chest, across the sugary sand of a moonlit beach and deep into a shimmering black sea where my innocence was shattered and I drown in breathless pleasure in his arms. Lord of a netherworld of bleak and craggy landscapes, of pale twin suns not warm enough to burn off the morning fog, master of torchlit caves and unmarked ships at sea, of slaves like me, chained to his dancing, musk-drenched bed. He is slim with smooth, hard flanks and skin like velvet, golden panther's eyes that steal resolve and melt resistance. He settles his length upon me, like a cloud envelops me fusing his nerve endings to mine and whispers, "Would you like to fly?" I slip free of my body, light and transparent as a soap bubble. But as always, before we can ascend together to skim the stars and merge with the great wheel of light that rotates above us at the relative speed of an Etruscan smile, the thread that binds me to the earth is yanked and, nerves blazing, I plummet back to awareness... To my husband's rapping on the pane of glass that's framed behind our bed... "That damned black cat is on the window sill again."   [ ? ]